Rethinking the state through everyday life in South Sudan

In 2011, after decades of war, South Sudan became the newest nation-state to emerge in the twenty-first century. Independence brought hopes for peace and self-determination, yet those aspirations soon confronted renewed conflict and the challenges of building a nation amid significant political, environmental, and economic uncertainty. The Post-State State is a political and urban ethnography of how South Sudanese people navigate this unsettled moment by imagining and striving for their possible futures in an open-ended state of becoming.

Christian J. Doll explores how residents of the capital, Juba, make and remake urban space through everyday practices of state-making and state-imagining. In a place where civilians’ fear of the state’s violent potential and the limits of territorial sovereignty are particularly extreme, Doll centers the ways South Sudanese people transform uncertainty into possibility. Hope, disappointment, and anticipation emerge not as opposing forces but as intertwined ways of understanding and acting in the world.

Through analyses of political rituals, social infrastructures, ethnic spatial claims, humanitarian governance, and plans for a new capital city, The Post-State State offers a new understanding of how the state is imagined and enacted. In doing so, this book advances broader conversations about state-making, sovereignty, precarity, and futurity in an increasingly uncertain political world.

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Christian J. Doll is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University.